Antiracism limited

• Autores: Roopali Mukherjee
• Localización: Cultural Studies, ISSN-e 1466-4348, Vol. 30, Nº. 1, 2016, págs. 47-77
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Liberal enthusiasm over the arrival of a ‘post-racial’ era in the USA found ecstatic release at the 2008 election of the first African-American to the presidency. Several years have passed since that event, and the idea of ‘post-race’ remains a potent, if uneasy, keyword within the national imaginary. Authorizing ‘official antiracisms’ of our day, post-race sanctions the governmentalities of racial neoliberalism, and forecloses alternative paradigms for antiracist struggle. Equally, it registers as a cruel joke of sorts, turning on studied denials of abiding inequalities and open to the lash of ridicule and scorn. At once absurd and alluring, post-race reveals the cultural career of a keyword marked by power and authority as well as tenacious counter-claims that show up its conceits and specious allure.

    A rich body of scholarship has emerged in recent years to unpack the meanings and implications of the term. These works typically take the Obama moment, unprecedented and consequential, as a key signifying theatre. This essay, however, begins elsewhere, suggesting instead that the 2008 victory constitutes a denouement, a narrative climax to epistemic struggles that shaped racial discourse over decades prior to and, indeed, anticipating Obama's arrival as post-racial icon. Offering a genealogical pre-history of post-race, the analysis uses the analytical lens of ‘bricolage’ to trace a range of articulations over a 40-year span that concludes with Obama's 2008 victory. The essay maps the riotous ascendance of post-race as well as its faltering claims to authority to reveal the conditions of possibility that gave rise to, and continue to provide traction for, the idea of the post-racial. Highlighting key epistemological shifts ushered in by the concept, the essay substantiates the terms of a third ‘racial break’ that works to foreclose all but those antiracist projects that serve the incentives of neoliberal capital